161–170 of 177 posts
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Free healthcare is a great incentive to be careless with your body. /s* edit: I was being sarcastic
I see you're being voted down but you might actually be right... if I feared that kind of monetary consequence I'd never walk out the door.
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I don't think thats true. There is a price bias, but thats not the only quality signal for medical care. There's reviews, facility and installations, reputation, etc. People are price sensitive regarding their own life and their children's. You can find how much they value things with "revealed preferences", an economists principle. Its a bigger problem that as a consumer you don't have to or face the decision of cho…
"Little Billy - would you mind biting on a bullet for an hour while I check Yelp and online reviews to find the cheapest doctor to set your broken arm." ...said no one ever.
We tried to intervene by offering them money, but they refused to take it. We got their church to intervene, after 3 days.
Very fortunately, xrays showed it was a minor fracture, no surgery needed. But that poor kid.
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But it's no different with a car mechanic. The mechanic gives you a quote. If the costs changes they get your explicit approval. That would be nice to start there on the medical side.
Can't really do that in the middle of surgery...
No one minds if there are common sense exceptions.
I've been wondering for a while now why health insurance companies exist at all. They introduce a massive bureaucracy and massive costs and provide very little value. They evolved from a reasonable idea into a monster that just drains our system and do not provide enough value to justify their existence in my opinion.
There are other non-insurance interventions like forcing hospitals to provide emergency care.
Rand Paul made a similar case last summer that if the government is seeking to to provide care for people who can't afford it, it should put the money into care instead of into insurance companies. It would be much cheaper an much more effective.
Note that if you go to the highlighted facility, you can still contact your insurance to pay for the procedure - its just that the doctors in this case are not doing that for you. I've never understood why doctors involved themselves in dealing with insurance companies. It's the patient's company, so the patient should deal with it. If more doctors did this, patients would realize that the real problem is the insurance companies. Market forces might even cause insurance companies to provide better service.
From my german perspective, every assumption in this article looks quite gross and barbaric. Here, everyone is insured. If you break your arm, you get it fixed. If you get cancer, you get therapy. If you get the flu, you get a prescription. The overall cost is paid by the entire population, through the insurance system. For what is the alternative? Maybe the overall monetary cost would be lower if everyone had to wat…
When I was looking to have a very serious health problem taken care of, I heavily researched getting the procedure done anywhere in the world. It was pretty obvious that all the best places to have it done were in the US. The facility we went to had quite a few patients from other countries - and we're not talking 3rd world countries. Many of these patients had already had care in their own country, where the care was botched or insufficient. They were coming to the US to get it done right. On their own dime.
Not sure how Germany is, but average wait time for an MRI in Canada is over 10 weeks.
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/studies/waiting-your-turn-wa...
In the US you can go right into an MRI on the same day. This is key to getting an appropriate standard of care.
In Canada, average wait time for an ultrasound is 4 weeks. Our pets get better care in the US. I really don't see how people tolerate such things.
From my german perspective, every assumption in this article looks quite gross and barbaric. Here, everyone is insured. If you break your arm, you get it fixed. If you get cancer, you get therapy. If you get the flu, you get a prescription. The overall cost is paid by the entire population, through the insurance system. For what is the alternative? Maybe the overall monetary cost would be lower if everyone had to wat…
From my American perspective, the national health systems of other countries have their own barbarities. There is a reason why so many people from other countries come to the US for health care. When I was looking to have a very serious health problem taken care of, I heavily researched getting the procedure done anywhere in the world. It was pretty obvious that all the best places to have it done were in the US. The…
So there is a sort of built-in insurance to this system. Those who don't have any complications are paying more to cover patients who do. They're simply passing the first line of medical costs (known, anticipated, where a price estimate can be created) on to consumers while letting insurance handle un-estimatable medical emergency type situations.
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>My local mechanic is required by law to tell me how much something is going to cost me before they start work. Why is my doctor not held to the same standard. Ever tried calling a provider to find out how much something is going to cost? Does that include a situation where say, when emptying out the oil, the nut over the drain breaks off which necessitates changing the oil sump, except they then discover the engine…
> Does that include a situation where say, when emptying out the oil, the nut over the drain breaks off which necessitates changing the oil sump, except they then discover the engine mounts are rusted and now the engine needs to be lifted and the mounts replaced? (I'm not a car guy, but I hope this demonstrates the thought even if inaccurate) Yes it does because the mechanic is required to call you and say, " Upon fu…
But, that idea ignores a fundamental problem with expert-based markets; it's impossible to me, as a non-consumer, to make a rational decision about which mechanic to use because to me, the mechanic is a black box. I don't have any way to immediately fact-check what they're telling me, and in the worst case, if a mechanic does something wrong, I may not find out about it until it's far to late to hold the do-er accountable. Thus, I can change mechanics based on the limited information I have available (price signals, perceived reputation) but, A) this distorts the market to optimize for low prices and perceived reputations instead of efficient prices for quality work, and B) I don't ultimately have any way of knowing whether I'm making the right decision when participating in this market. At least, not in the time frame where that knowledge is useful.
The same, holds true with 'free' health markets; I'm not a doctor so I can't accurately tell if my doctor is lying to me, which should cause similar distortions in an ostensibly free healthcare market. Additionally, as with an auto mechanic, if I need something done -now-, my demand for that service becomes completely inelastic, which means prices for emergency services/procedures should become obscenely high.
They already are today, and people are -already- getting forced into bankruptcy by emergency medical expenses, so I can't speak to whether or how a market sans insurance might change that phenomenon, but it seems to me that the goal ought to be to eliminate it entirely, and that in turn a 'free' healthcare market cannot be the end goal.
That said, I don't think I know enough about the subject to pick out a particular optimal solution to this problem. I like the -idea- of single payer or other universal healthcare solutions, but I haven't studied any of them in enough depth to analyse them critically; dealing with healthcare in the UK was a joy while I lived there, so I wouldn't mind having that experience here in the US, but that in turn requires a lot of government funding (among other things), and we can already see that that's unsustainable in the short term by what's happening to the ACA.